We must back Israel over Hamas terror chief killing

The Israelis have killed one of the Middle East's most violent terrorists, yet, unsurprisingly, support from Britain is not forthcoming

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Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari, the leading operative in Hamas, the anti-Semitic terror group that runs Gaza, has been killed by an Israeli strike, provoking the predictable response from the usual suspects in Britain and Europe.

The Foreign Office came out with the standard, dithering rubbish effectively refusing to take sides. The FCO tweeted:

"We continue to call on all sides to exercise restraint to prevent a dangerous escalation that would be in no one’s interests. #Gaza"

It could have been worse, of course. It could have been a response from the BBC.

Despite the fact that the Israeli attack came in response to unprovoked rocket attacks emanating from Gaza, the Guardian glowingly quoted the BBC's Wyre Davies as calling the Israeli attack “a massive escalation of the situation around Gaza”.

Perhaps Britain's declaration of war against Germany after the Third Reich's invasion of Poland in 1939 could have been described as a "massive escalation". But it would surely have been an odd inversion of reality, totally failing to distinguish between aggression and self-defence.

The Israeli Defence Force has said it is prepared for all options, including sending ground forces into Gaza itself; an unsurprising response to Hamas's pledge to open "the gates of hell" against the Jewish state.

Egypt, now run by the Muslim Brotherhood -- of which Hamas is an affiliate -- has condemned the Israeli operation, and others around the Arab and Muslim world have done likewise.

It would be interesting to see how we Britons would respond if we had been attacked by several hundred rockets in the last year. Just sitting back and taking it would probably not be what we would expect from our leaders.

Things could get very much worse in the next few days, and now is the time for the British government to support Israel to the hilt rather than play silly and rather ignorant games of equivalence between a Holocaust denying group like Hamas and democratic Israel.